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COVID-19, the most successful digital transformation driver


Johannesburg, 08 Apr 2020

The national lockdown due to COVID-19 is probably the biggest and most successful accelerator forcing companies to transform their businesses. It is unimaginable how an entire country digitally transforms its businesses within a week.

Over the past 10 years, technology and infrastructure has evolved rapidly, allowing us to do things like work from home, answer e-mails on the go, approve purchase orders and leave applications while standing in a queue at the supermarket, and have face-to-face meetings across the globe without ever leaving your house. Even though the technology is out there, we’ve never before been so appreciative of this fact until this lockdown.

Big questions are being asked by companies big and small. Questions like: “How am I going sell if I cannot attend meetings?” and: “Who’s going to answer the phones if nobody is in the office?” Another big one is: “Can I trust that my staff will be able to get their work done efficiently from home?”

All these types of questions have been asked many times over the years and, in fact, have been used as the typical excuses to prevent change and to stick to what we know and what we’ve been used to.

So a global pandemic steps in and forces us to change. Not many of us have been able to adapt quickly enough (not yet) and the nature of some businesses might not lend themselves to change easily, for example, transport companies and factories where working from home is not an option. Even these companies are changing, however small, to adapt to this challenge.

At Noscotek, we’ve embraced this challenge wholeheartedly and, quite honestly, we’ve surprised ourselves. When the conversations started about social distancing and self-isolation, we made the calls to ensure our staff remained safe and practised social distancing and washing hands regularly.

Our customers started doing the same and very soon, meetings were postponed and rescheduled to happen online using the popular tools like Skype and Microsoft Teams. In a way, using this technology was nothing new and we had a handle on it. When the lockdown was announced, we immediately sprung into action and, by 23 March, four days before lockdown started, we had already equipped all staff to work from home. We worked out the kinks and, by lockdown, we were already helping our customers to do the same.

We are a solutions provider for Laserfiche, a tool that has proven fundamental in our business as well as our customers' to enable digital true transformation. Many of our customers were in a fortunate position to send their own staff home, knowing that Laserfiche would still allow business to continue. Access to documents and business process continuity was easy and customers could focus on other areas of the business that needed change, like how to support their employees during the transition and not worry about how they’re going to run their processes.

The challenges that we faced as a company have been addressed with other exciting technologies that we’ve implemented, which allow us to stay in contact in real-time with voice, video and instant screen sharing, without putting a burden on how we work. In fact, using these methods we’ve discovered, we’ve been able to be more productive and get more done in a day than when we were at our best pre-lockdown. Our team at Noscotek has certainly risen to the challenge and proven to us that truly digitally transforming every aspect of business is possible, and we are very proud of this team’s ability to adapt to such a big change, while still keeping the lights on for our customers.

COVID-19 is a terrible situation that has changed many lives around the world, and our reality as businesses, workers and generally as humans will never be the same again. It certainly is no longer “business as usual”.

We’d love to hear about your own challenges, and we would love to share with you how we have overcome them ourselves, without adding to our own overheads (we’re saving money, thankfully). Talk to us and let us share with you too. After all, we’re all in this together now. 

Visit our Web site at www.noscotek.co.za.

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Noscotek

Noscotek is an Authorized Distributor for Laserfiche Software in the Sub-Sahara African region. Noscotek is well experience in business processes automation and transforming businesses to go digital with Laserfiche, and drive Task automation, Business process automation and integrate with any line of business systems, without replacing it. 

Laserfiche

Laserfiche is a leading global provider of enterprise content management software, empowering organisations to take control of information and business processes. With intuitive on-premises and cloud solutions for document management and process automation, Laserfiche improves productivity, efficiency and strategic decision-making for organisations looking to transform into a digital workplace. For more than three decades, Laserfiche has fostered an active user community that shares ideas and inspires solutions. To learn more, visit http://laserfiche.com/about-laserfiche

Editorial contacts

Bianca Bornman
Client Enablement Manager
(011) 100 4678
bianca@noscotek.co.za